Afternoon summary

David Davis has claimed that “regulatory alignment” with the EU is what the government wants for the whole of the UK after Brexit. (See 3.07pm.) He said this was not the same as regulatory convergence, or staying in the single market, and it was not clear from his comments in the Commons whether this means the government is taking a new position on the (as yet unresolved) matter of whether it wants to stick quite closely to the European regulatory model after Brexit. But his words did imply that the government is keen to play down the suggestion that Northern Ireland will be different from the rest of the UK after Brexit. Davis said “regulatory alignment” was something for the whole of the UK. But he did not address one of the specific problems with the draft text of the Brexit deal released yesterday; that, in the event of there being “no deal”, it would commit Northern Ireland to shadowing EU regulation while leaving the rest of the UK to go its own way. (See 2.26pm.)

Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, has said that the DUP spent five weeks trying to get hold of a draft text of the UK-EU Brexit deal and that, when it finally saw it yesterday, it was “a big shock”. (See 5.17pm.) She told RTE:

When we looked at the wording [on regulatory alignment]and had seen the import of all that we knew we couldn’t sign up to anything that was in that text that would allow a border to develop in the Irish Sea.

And, in a separate interview with Sky, when it was put to her that the Irish government has said it will not budge on the substance of this point, she replied:

The Irish prime minister can be as unequivocal as he likes. We’re also unequivocal in relation to these matters.

The Telegraph’s Gordon Rayner says a telephone call between Foster and Theresa May planned for tonight may not take place.

Gordon Rayner (@gordonrayner)

I'm hearing that May phone call to Foster might not happen today as DUP feel there is so much work to be done on wording of deal that there's no point in phoning at this stage.

David Gauke, the work and pensions secretary, has said the government will release a set of reports on the operation of universal credit to a Commons select committee. He was speaking after Labour arranged for MPs to debate a motion this afernoon saying the papers must be published. If the government had tried opposing the motion, it faced defeat.

Ruth Davidson’s demands that any special deal with the EU for Northern Ireland should be extended across the UK has been unanimously endorsed by the Scottish Conservatives’ 13 MPs at Westminster, the party has said.

The Scottish Tory group, which jumped from one solitary MP to 13 after June’s snap election, includes Eurosceptic MPs known to have voted leave, in Ross Thomson and Alister Jack, but also David Mundell, the Scottish secretary, who backed the group stance. In a statement, the party said:

The Scottish Conservative group met today and unanimously agreed that we fully support the comments from Ruth Davidson MSP that the terms of any Brexit deal with the EU should be UK-wide.

Their statement came after David Davis, the Brexit secretary, had told the Commons that any “regulatory alignment” with the single market to help keep the Irish border open would be UK-wide, reducing its immediate significance.

But it suggests Davis and Number 10 have faced wider pressure from within the party to scrap yesterday’s mooted deal with the EU and Ireland to make the offer apply solely to Northern Ireland.

It is understood that Mundell had earlier endorsed Davidson’s blunt warning on Tuesday morning that nothing could happen to undermine the UK’s internal market and constitutional balance in this morning’s UK cabinet meeting.

Foster says draft of UK-EU Brexit deal came as 'big shock' to DUP

Lisa O'Carroll

The DUP leader Arlene Foster has said the text of the Irish border deal came as a “big shock” when she saw it yesterday.

In an interview with RTE News about to be broadcast she said her party only saw the text late yesterday morning as British and Irish officials were tying up loose ends ahead of Theresa May’s lunch meeting with Jean Claude Juncker.

“Once we saw the text, we knew it was not going to be acceptable,” she told RTE’s Northern Ireland correspondent Tommy Gorman.

She told him the DUP had been asking for the text for five weeks.

She also said she had a very open conversation with May after the DUP press conference in which she said they could sign not up to anything that would mean a border in the Irish sea.

She told her “it could have been dealt with differently”.

Foster said she had been told by British negotiators that the Irish government did not want her to see the text ahead of yesterday’s crunch meeting in Brussels.

“We are told that the Irish government prevented it coming to us.

Gorman asked: “Who told you that?”

She replied: “The British negotiating team”.

UPDATE: Here is more from the interview.

Foster indicated she wanted the detailed negotiations relating to the future governance of the Irish border removed from the negotiating document and revealed that there had been “no contact” with Dublin over the text.

She also attacked the “aggressive” campaign by the Irish government on Brexit and said unionists were spooked after the tanaiste Simon Coveney told a Dail committee that one of his aspirations was united Ireland in his political lifetime.

This thesis was rejected by the deputy prime minister Coveney last Friday when he said it was difficult not to get drawn into identity politics when discussing northern Ireland but it was not an “green vs orange” issue.

“I think the Irish government have insisted on a lot of detail in relation to the border – they don’t need to have detail to move on to phase two, so they can talk about trade, they have listened to the UK government and indeed ourselves around the fact we don’t want a hard border,” Foster told RTE. She went on:

We want to move forward together, but instead of accepting that as bona fides, they have decided they want a lot more detail and they are pushing at an agenda which leads a lot of unionists that there is something else.

I think it has been very clear that there has been a very aggressive agenda coming from Dublin recently.

I regret that of course, when Simon Coveney went to the Dail committee and talked about his aspiration for a united Ireland in his political lifetime, I think a lot of people noted that and then noted his stance in relation to the border.

People have jumped to conclusions. I don’t know whether those conclusions are right or wrong we will have to see in the future if that is the case.

Nobody wants to see a hard border, but the reality is there is a border. It’s there because we are two different jurisdictions and people need to be reminded of that sometime.

I’ve seen some commentary about how awful it is that the DUP are trying to cut off north-south trade, nothing could be further from the truth.

We want north -outh trade to continue, but we fundamentally want east-west trade to continue as well because – and the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but they have been presented as thus in this document and that’s not something we can support.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission president, has told the BBC that he expects to meet Theresa May tomorrow or on Thursday to conclude the Brexit deal, but not on Friday or Saturday, Natalie Higgins reports.

Natalie Higgins (@nataliesophia)

.@JunckerEU tells @adamfleming that he'll meet @theresa_may "maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow" but "not on Friday and Saturday because I'm out of town...I'm very confident that we'll do it." #Brexit

Scotland’s 13 Conservative MPs have backed Ruth Davidson’s comments about how any regulatory alignment deal for Northern Ireland should apply to the whole of the UK. (See 10.08pm.) This is from the BBC’s Nick Eardley.

Nick Eardley (@nickeardleybbc)

Scottish Tory group at Westminster "met today and unanimously agreed that we fully support the comments from Ruth Davidson MSP that the terms of any Brexit deal with the EU should be UK-wide.”

MPs are debating universal credit at the moment. As the Press Association reports, the Conservative MP Heidi Allen was left in tears after hearing the “destitution” faced by people as a result of government welfare reforms. Allen struggled to speak following a speech by the Labour MP Frank Field, in which he described persuading a man not to commit suicide and how an organisation separately helped a child “crying through hunger”. Field, chairman of the Commons work and pensions committee, said the father of the child also said he had had a “lucky week” after neighbours invited him to a funeral “so they could finish off the food” once the other guests had been fed.

Rising to speak after Field, Allen said:

I don’t know where to start after that. I’m humbled by the words from my honourable, good friend from Birkenhead. No government is perfect, no benefits system is perfect, no debate, no motion is perfect, but by God we work together and make this better.

Intervening to give Allen a chance to compose herself, Field said:

I’m just amazed for the first time I’ve been able to report those events publicly without weeping. I’m so affected by them, I’m affected as she is. That’s the debate we’re really having - how do we represent here the desperateness of many of our constituents when many of us feel we can’t offer them hope.

The plot thickens: Source tells me they recently (prior to yesterday) spoke to a senior DUP figure who said at that point that they could accept regulatory alignment in a few areas such as animal health. Was the problem the Dublin & Brussels' spin of the extent of that alignment?

Nigel Dodds' comments in London seem to support this hypothesis. He said DUP had "several [Government] briefings over the course of the last few weeks" on this; DUP accepts "some sort of regulatory alignment - in certain specific areas" but final text had "far too much ambiguity"

RTE’s Europe editor Tony Connelly has hit back at reports in the UK that his report of a leaked draft and amended document was part of “Irish propaganda” and unintentionally led to the collapse of talks.

He said “RTE protects its sources” but he was able to confirm the leak did not come from the Irish government. He also pointed out he reported the leak at 11.15am, 15 minutes after Jean Claude Juncker confirmed to Leo Varadkar that the British had agreed the final wording.

The Irish prime minister has said he believes there is plenty of time to salvage the Irish border Brexit deal, scuppered by the DUP before it was inked.

Speaking for the second time since talks collapsed Leo Varadkar revealed that the controversial wording for the proposal to have “regulatory alignment” between Northern Ireland and the EU post Brexit was British negotiator’s preferred option, not Ireland’s.

“There was an exchange of texts – one being regulatory divergence and no regulatory alignment.

“We satisfied ourselves on Sunday night that we could accept either of those two lines and ‘regulatory alignment’ was what was accepted by British advisers on Monday morning,” he told the Irish parliament during leader’s questions.

In the most detailed official account yet of the contents of the 15-page proposal, Varadkar revealed it provided for three potential outcomes in a final deal.

1) “UK free trade agreement that would allow free trade to continue not just north and south but between Britain and Ireland.”

2) “a bespoke arrangement involving technology and others things.”

3) if neither of this were agreed in the final Brexit deal there would be “ongoing regulatory alignment between north and south” which would have been “a back stop if all else failed”.

Varadkar told the Dail that “ball is now in London’s court” and he “very much regretted” that it was not possible to conclude matters yesterday.

But he said he was optimistic a deal could still be sealed as the EU council did not meet until 14 December, giving Theresa May enough time to square the proposal with the DUP.

The Irish Ambassador to London called for the Democratic Unionists to step back and reflect calmly at the proposal to prevent a hard border in Northern Ireland post-Brexit, blaming garbled leaks for leading the DUP to reject a document the Irish government thought the Unionists had accepted.

Speaking at the Institute for Government in London, Adrian O’Neill also warned an agreement would have to be hammered out by the end of this week to be ready in time for the EU heads of government summit planned for next week. The summit has been slated to give the go ahead to the start of a second phase of Brexit talks focused on the UK’s future trading relationship with the EU.

Urging the DUP to stay calm, he said:

There are sometimes days like yesterday when something is about to happen, garbled versions get leaked in the media, people adopt robust positions, everyone gets very worked up, and sometimes it gets very difficult to de-escalate that in a couple of hours, and get people back into deal making.

Sometimes what is needed for everyone to step back and to calmly think about it and to focus on the totality of the package on the table. Our hope is that is possible and the British government and the DUP are able to re-engage, and look at this afresh.

He urged the DUP through “calm reflection to look at the document holistically”.

He insisted the document contained a range of reassurances for unionists, including a recognition that the future constitutional status of Northern Ireland can only be altered by the provisions of the Good Friday agreement . The agreement prevents the unification of the island without referenda on both sides of the border.

He did not deny specifically that the Irish government had been responsible for the leak in Brussels that so upset the DUP, saying instead it is never wise to make assumptions about the sources of leaks.

And he indicated that aspects of the agreement for Ireland would not be settled until the second stage of the talks.

There was a clear commitment to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, but he said the leaked passage in the document about preventing regulatory divergence was a backstop, and alternative routes to securing this goal that were closer to the UK government positions had also been set out as alternatives in the document.

The Labour party has issued a statement clarifying its position on the single market and the customs union in the light of Sir Keir Starmer’s comments (see 3.07pm), the Mirror’s Dan Bloom reports.

Dan Bloom (@danbloom1)

NEW: Labour spokesman on what Labour's Brexit policy is, after Keir Starmer said the option of the single market should be "put back on the table for negotiation". Attempt to interpret at your leisure. pic.twitter.com/aJQzEwkNuy

David Davis's Commons Brexit statement - Summary and analysis

Here are the main points from the David Davis’s urgent question about the Brexit talks.

Davis, the Brexit secretary, said that “regulatory alignment” with the EU is what the government wanted for the whole of the UK after Brexit. This was not the same as regulatory convergence, or harmonisation, he claimed. And he made the point repeatedly to counter claims that the UK wanted an outcome that would separate Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK. (See 2.26pm for more, including an explanation about how what is proposed for Northern Ireland does seem to be different.) In response to a question from Labour’s Yvette Cooper, Davis said that what he was saying was just what Theresa May said in her Florence speech. He told her:

[May] made a very plain case for the sorts of divergence that we would see after we left. And she made the case that there are areas where we want the same outcome, but by different regulatory methods. We want to maintain safety, we want to maintain food standards, we want to maintain animal welfare, we want to maintain employment rights. We don’t have to do that by exactly the same mechanism as everybody else. That’s what regulatory alignment means.

Adam Lent, director of the New Local Government Network, has a good follow up.

Adam Lent (@adamjlent)

If 'regulatory alignment' is not the same as regulatory harmonisation, as David Davis is claiming, then surely you ultimately end up with regulatory disalignment sooner or later. Why would EU agree to a deep trade deal and soft Irish border on that basis?

Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, urged the government to put staying in the customs union and the single market for good back on the table as negotiating options. He said:

So the question for the government today is this: will the prime minister now rethink her reckless red lines and put options such as a customs union and single market back on the table for negotiation? Because if the price of the prime minister’s approach is the break-up of the union and reopening of bitter divides in Northern Ireland then the price is too high.

After the UQ Ben Bradshaw, the pro-European Labour MP, put out this statement on behalf of Open Britain, which is campaigning for a soft Brexit. He said:

Today’s shift by the Labour frontbench, and its call for the single market and customs union to be put back on the table by the Government, is extremely welcome.

Nearly every Labour MP who spoke in today’s urgent question called for the UK to stay in the single market and customs union. The Labour party is increasingly united around this position.

Nigel Dodds, the DUP leader at Westminster, accused the Irish government of acting in an “aggressive and anti-unionist way” during the Brexit talks. He said:

It should come as no surprise that the Dublin and Irish government wishes to advance its interests. The way it has gone about it in such an aggressive and anti-unionist way is disgraceful and has set back Anglo-Irish relations and damaged the relationships built up within Northern Ireland in terms of the devolution settlement - and that is going to take a long time to repair.

Davis claimed that when people were voting to leave the EU, they knew they were voting to leave the customs union.

The Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, a hardline Brexiter, praised the DUP for opposing the EU deal proposed yesterday. He said:

[The DUP] have helped Her Majesty’s government stick to its own policy in these negotiations. Is it not essential that the red lines on maintaining the United Kingdom and on regulatory divergence whence the benefits of leaving come are indelible red lines?

My colleague Daniel Boffey has this response from an EU official to what David Davis was saying in his UQ. (See 2.26pm.)

Daniel Boffey (@DanielBoffey)

EU official on DD's suggestion that whole of UK will align with EU regs. "The UK will not have any say on the decisions taken in Brussels and will basically implement them without having any influence over them... it makes the UK kind of a regulatory 'protectorate" of Brussels'".